Page 3

I'm very excited about the coming Lifting our Horizons event in Christchurch on Monday 30 September. Those attending will have the privilege of hearing internationally renowned designer, Mary Featherston, who has chosen to attend at short notice and share her insights and experience as an interior designer specialising in the design of learning environments for young people.

Participants in CORE Education’s recent MLE tour of schools in Melbourne heard her name mentioned frequently as they moved among schools, and saw the evidence of Mary’s influence and design thinking in many of the environments they visited.

The focus of Mary’s research and practice is the relationship between contemporary progressive pedagogy and design of the physical environment. Mary has designed responsive learning environments for early childhood services, schools, and cultural venues. Her approach to design of schools is holistic and involves consideration of all layers of the physical environment and how they interact to support social and learning relationships. Mary’s research-based practice involves intense collaborations with innovative educators, school communities, academic researchers, and policy makers.

Mary will be presenting alongside other international guests, including Ewan McIntosh from Scotland and Mark Trotter (CEFPI president) from Australia, plus a range of other learning space designers and educators who will assemble to share their experience and insights around creating modern learning environments.

The old way and the new

Back in the bad old days, with limited transportation and communication, it was difficult to learn something if you were not physically near someone who could teach you. If I was a farmer, and I wanted to learn more about bookkeeping, but there wasn’t a bookkeeper in my village, I was plum out of luck. In order to counter this, the design of schools was centred on physical proximity. What we did was put a bunch of people who knew about stuff into one building, and we sent the children to that building in the hope that they would learn from those clever people. This design served us really well for a long time, but, as technology has improved, we now find ourselves in quite a different world. It’s a world of ubiquitous learning, where learning is available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, almost anywhere in the world.

Knowledge has become more available

As Tony Wagner says, ‘Knowledge is now a commodity; it’s free, like water or air.’ So, the system we built, that centred around efficiently moving information from one person’s head to another, where one person stood at the front of a room talking, and 50 people sat facing them, listening, writing it down, and trying to memorise that knowledge, needs to change. But, let’s be clear, knowing things will always be important. There will never be a time when ignorance will be an asset. Increasingly, the world values not simply the knowing of things, but what you can do with the things you know.

So, things like relatively low-cost computing devices, wireless internet, and 3 and 4G networks mean that we can overcome the tyranny of time and place. We no longer need to be in the same room as an expert, at a time convenient to both of us, for me to be able to learn from that expert. Think of something like the thousands of guitar tutorials on YouTube. If I want to learn from the best, I don’t need to travel to wherever they live, I just need a guitar and an internet connection. Even better, I can rewind that learning as many times as I need in order to go at my own pace, not the pace of most people in my class.

The challenge to schools

Open the doors to this new way of learning

The challenge to schools is two-fold: open up our doors to bring the ubiquitous learning that exists out there inside our schools, and arrange what we do in our schools so students have access to what’s out there. One of the most exciting things about ubiquitous learning is the fact that we can now put learning back where it belongs: out in the community, next to the people who want it.

Let me give you an example. If I were walking to school and I notice that the river beside me is flooded and a different colour, in the bad old days I would have to find an expert and ask her what was going on. In a world of ubiquitous learning, if I’ve got a device and a 3G connection: I can pull up a Google Earth view of the landscape, see that the river actually drains from the foothills of the local mountain range, overlay that with data from the Metservice to find that there has been a weather system carrying a lot of rain from the west over the last few days, then search for a YouTube video to learn more about erosion and sedimentation in rivers. All this in the landscape while following an authentic question of my own asking.

How will we spend our time in the classroom?

The other part of ubiquitous learning that is a challenge for schools is this: If we have traditionally spent a lot of time lining students up in rows and having them face the front, but now no longer need to do that in order to get knowledge out to them, what do we do with that time? Does ubiquitous learning mean that we can offer an increasingly personalised pathway through learning for each individual? Does it mean that the teacher’s role becomes more of an activator than a facilitator, that we need to be building the dispositions of lifelong learning rather than ensuring the learning takes place? If the answer to these questions is yes, then we need to radically re-think how we arrange learning in schools.

And if we don’t, we run the risk of holding on to a lot of practices from the bad old days.

Drivers for this trend

Social:

Social media

always on, always connected

Technology

mobile technologies

cloud computing

online services

UFB access

wireless

Educational

Learning works best in the right context and the right time. Ubiquity helps learning be right there.

Implications

Is your school network prepared to accommodate the influx of student-owned mobile devices being connected?

How would you describe the concept of “the cloud” to your staff or board of trustees?

How could your school make effective use of ‘cloud-based’ applications and services for students and staff?

Are your ‘home learning’ and ‘school learning’ experiences as rich and as deep as each other?

I wonder how many iwi have been asked whether they want to be partners in education? Perhaps someone has just presumed they want to, or should do, and therefore created a “partnership” thrust through school, by which teachers must adhere. Ko te kai a te rangatira he kōrero?

Why do schools find it difficult to engage with iwi? Some schools don’t know where to start looking. What about schools that are located in pan-tribal areas? What should they do?

My perception is that not all iwi see education as a priority; many individuals in iwi have gained very little from education, from schools, and have limited or no experience at tertiary level. Why would they want to re-engage in a system that continues to fail their mokopuna, as it did them?

I also see other iwi who do want to engage, but don’t know how, or what that engagement might look like. They can hardly just turn up at a range of schools and knock on the door.

There’s presently a big focus on lifting achievement for priority learners in all sectors. Ka pai. And, a strong suggestion that schools should “engage” with iwi and communities of Māori learners. Ka pai hoki. But, how do we do this? Who’s got the missing piece of the puzzle?

Schools want and need iwi participation, iwi want and need high standards of achievement for their children, but for many, the two are miles part.

Nā tō rourou, nā tāku rourou, ka ora te iwi?

Who’s calling the shots? Who’s controlling the resource? Who has the aspiration? Is it a reality in the present parameters?

Think for a moment about the kinds of success stories we read about in the press about how some young people use the web: sharing their music and scoring a recording contract, blogging from a fashion show and creating a TV channel on YouTube, and working with others to write software for smart phones. We also hear stories that are of more concern such as bullying on social networking sites, or the sharing of inappropriate photos. It has never been easier to connect, network, and collaborate as a result of the evolution of ‘the social web’. This trend reflects the ways that we can all now use the web to enable. amplify, and extend social connections.

Drivers for this trend

The exponential growth of social web technologies, such as social networks and social media.

The ease with which individuals can access and create meaning for themselves via increasingly ubiquitous connectivity, and the rise of the agentic learner.

The issue for teachers and schools is that it’s never been easier for learners to access and create information for themselves. If control over how we access information is shifting, what does this mean for the role of the teachers and for the way we design learning experiences and curriculum programmes?

Implications

Identity and connections — the ‘who and why’

Whenever we upload and share information we add to the identity we are creating for ourselves online. We share data, we upload photographs, and we can have multiple identities across different online spaces. That has implications for the kind of values and the kind of expectations that we have of ourselves and the people around us.

We are also connected to each other in networks, communities, and groups, which provides a huge opportunity for sharing knowledge and sharing information. The implication for schools is in how are they supporting students to develop clear values and integrity, and to take responsibility over the way that they share and interact as individuals online. Check our our Digital Citizenship trend and the work of NetSafe.

The importance of values, key competencies, and of a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship with meaningful learning.

Filters, identities, and digital literacy — the ‘what’

There is an unprecedented amount of information to be shared and created. We can ask other people the answer at the click of a button, but what does this mean for the way our students come to understand Science or History? We have got to help young people learn how to filter information themselves, and help them to become discriminating, questioning readers of the information that they find online. The challenge for schools is to encourage students to develop questions of their own, to not accept easy answers, to look for arguments that go against their own point of view, and to question deeply by looking at information from all kinds of different perspectives. For example, watch the ICOT keynote from Ewan McIntosh as he talks about helping young people become ‘problem finders’.

The importance of working with learners to generate questions that are meaningful, not easily answered, require testing, iteration, and application.

User-driven learning and inclusive — the ‘how’

Web-based technologies are now essentially social in design. Recent years have seen an explosion in social networking sites and social media platforms with news stories and all manner of content going viral in fast-response feedback loops. It is rare to visit a site that doesn’t support sharing, linking, and broadcasting to networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Multimedia resources and technologies on the web now offer unprecedented ways for us to design learning that offers pathways into new collaborative modes of learning, and to sharing our learning with whānau and communities.

Importance of sharing control with learners, allowing them to have agency over what they learn and how they learn it, designing inclusively.

What does this mean for schools?

As well as schools beginning to make the most of the social web for their students’ learning and for their own professional learning, there has been growth in the way they use social networks to draw their wider community together. There is growing enthusiasm for teachers to draw on professional networks to complement and sustain their own learning. Check out the collection of approaches that teachers shared when we called on our social networks for ideas in over 48 hours. The big shift now is towards thinking of ourselves as part of a network, and of each individual as having control and agency over how they chose to learn.

Three big questions that apply to both students and teachers

Who: How do our schools support students to act with integrity, to be responsive and effective online? How is this meaningfully part of the curriculum or professional learning?

What: Are we offering a curriculum that provokes deep questioning, allows students to construct the direction, weigh up information and build discrimination?

How: How can we allow students to drive the learning, connect, collaborate, and harness the technology to show learning in multiple ways?

Educators are regularly looking for images. You need them for a PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentation, for a display, an activity, a report, or you want your students to find suitable images for their project. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got to have just the right image for the job. If I can, I’ll take my own photo to get what I want, but someˆtimes that’s not possible. And, for some reason, it always seems easier, like a lot of resource hunting today, to search for it on the Net.

For years I simply “Googled it”, and up would come a mind-numbing list of photos to wade through on any given subject. One estimate suggests that there is between 500 billion to 1 trillion images on the Internet (Flickr alone had 6 billion photos in 2011, and Facebook—although, not accessible in Google searches—100 billion). Well, that’s okay if you’re happy that all the other things on your To Do list can wait for another day, and the presentation you’re preparing for is eons away.

But if that’s not the way you work—and there’s not too many of us that do—this method of photo searching can be a source of enormous frustration! There’s this tension between time and getting the right image—it ends up being quite an emotional issue. Especially when it’s more than one image that you need to find, which is usually the case.

Google’s image selection improvements

Google has recognised this issue, too. Of course, Google has our wellbeing at heart, and they, in turn, want a place in our hearts. So, they’ve worked on improving both the presentation and the selection process to provide peace of mind to the overwealmed searcher. Let’s have a look at some of these in Google Images. I’ve been going the long way round on this for years, and it was my son (Oh, to be young and inquisitive) that alerted me to other possibilities by doing some simple exploring. A little bit of time spent snooping around will save you time—and frustration.

So let's go.

The suggestions list

The useful suggestions list for refining your search that automatically appears as you type in your search term has been around for a little while now. But, isn't it interesting, how, like pop-ups and banner ads, some of us block out what could be useful to us? Lesson one: check the list!

The sub-topic menu

But, the addition of the relatively new suggested sub-topics in a bar at the head of your more general search results is a very handy innovation by Google.

On many search results you get the handy filter selection bar at the top of the search.

Time-losing issues for image searches

But, even with these improvements, there’s got to be a more efficient way to get the right image. And not only that, there’s several other issues:

Copyright:
Having found an image, you still have the question: is it legal to just take it even for personal use, or for the classroom? Google just has a warning to say “it could be under copyright”. Without the hassle of having to contact the owner of the site, the temptations is to just use it. Not good role modelling.

Image size:
How often do you find exactly the image you are looking for, only to find that it’s at some size totally unusable for your needs! It just adds to the frustration.

Image colour:
Sometimes you are trying to preserve a colour theme for your presentation. Looking for predominantly orange photos as well as looking for the kind of shot you’re looking for is rather difficult.

Image type:
You want to preserve a particular style—maybe line drawings. How are you going to wade through all images just to get that?

File type:
For some uses, JPGs and PNGs are fine, but you don’t want ICO graphics or SVGs. Until you’ve looked at each image, you don’t know what file type it is.

Specific or current events:
You’re looking for a good photo of a specific event that occurred just a few days ago. Or, it may be photos of some historic occasion 50 years ago. You can always do a normal search for that event, but results are generally not that good for finding all available photos, let alone having to wade through individual websites.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could filter all these things out?

Search tools relief

Well, you can! It’s there under our noses. It really pays to snoop around these buttons and options in the Google Images interface. Try clicking on the Search tools button:

And this is what magically appears:

There you go!

Size

colour

type of image

file type

time options

All rolled out! By clicking on the More tools option, you can have the actual image size displayed under each image in the search results list.

And the functionality of this options list is really clever. You can put all these options to work at once by simply setting each option. For example, you can select under the Size menu option all medium-sized images. Then select your colour, then the type of image, say, Clip art. You can even display the actual sizes on all images in the resulting search.

But there’s an even faster and more powerful way than this. And, it also resolves the only other bugbear, the copyright issue.

Become a Google Images super power user

Real power is not far away; it's at your fingertips. It comes in the form of this little button here (Google calls it the Options button): .

Click on it, and you get this list of options:

Click on the Advance search option. Don’t be afraid, it’s not intimidating at all. Actually, you’ll find a lot of the stuff we’ve already seen above, plus a little more. And by using this wonderful option list, you'll find your anxiety levels and blood pressure decreases dramatically, and deadlines a possibility.

There are only two sections on this page:

Find images with…

Then narrow your results by…

Simplicity plus! And Google steps you through it, as well as providing helpful hints. Let's look at the first section:

Find images with…

This section is asking for your search term. It allows you to refine your search so that you can get very specific. If you're following along on Google Images, you'll notice the helpful advice Google offers on the right side of the range of field boxes (not shown on the image above). Use them. You want a specific image on a specific topic, here’s where you can get exactly that. You’re looking for a grey squirrel in St Jame’s Park, London, on a branch in snow? This is where you’d put that information. If you want a range of options, you’ve got a field that you can add this information separating each option by the word OR. Just check the instructions on the right, and you can get exactly what you want.

And the next section is even simpler, and even more helpful!

Then narrow your results by…

You will recognise most of the options in this section: image size, colours in the image, type of image, and file type. This is the same list of options we’ve already seen out on the main page that we looked at under Search tools. You’ll notice that if you have already looked for something using the Search tools options, these will already be filled out for you on this Advanced search page.

But there’s some most helpful extras in this section as well.

Aspect ratio: you can choose the shape of the image. You would like only panoramic shots? Viola! How cool is that!

Region: you can specify what country you want the subject matter to be from. You want Jewish synagogues in Poland, or Zimbabwe pound notes, or Kiwifruit in Argentina? Or, maybe a Bengali tiger in a cage in Moscow? I can’t promise you that there are any images there (I haven’t checked), but if there are, they'll show up in the search results. Well, as best as Google’s search engines can define the images available on the Net, and let’s be honest, it’s become remarkably good at it!

Safe search: can filter out anything explicit if that could be a problem in your search term. Some words lend themselves to including unwelcomed images.

Usage rights: at last, the copyright issue can be solved. And look at the list of options available: from unfiltered through to free to share and use commercially (if that’s an issue issue to you). Solved.

So, you have at your fingertips amazing tools for speeding up the process of finding and selecting images exactly as you require them. And there's more there to explore. Just click on the links at the bottom left of the page, and see what they can do for you.

But, Google’s not the only option

Of course, while Google has provided these amazing tools, there’s no guarantee that you will find the exact image you need. Google does have some downsides. Images come from all sorts of sites, good and bad, so quality is not always the best.

I also have some favourite free image sites, and even some free image search engines I use all the time. That’s for my next post.

Share your Google Images tips

In the meantime, if you have some other secrets to be found under Google Images' hood, please share them that others may take some of the frustration out of their day.